Shedding Skins
by Clavain
Summary: This is their legend; this is their legacy; these are the lives six snakes have lived - a one-shot covering the lives of each snake - part 1/6 of they made a statue of us


**shedding skins**

Part 1 of they made a statue of us

this is their legend; this is their legacy; these are the lives six snakes have lived

1: naked; big boss; john

2: venom; phantom; punished

3: liquid; white mamba; eli

4: liquid; ocelot

5: solidus; king; george sears

6: solid; old; david

 **1: naked; big boss; john**

Big Boss is a warrior with one eye and bleeding feet who has patched up more wounds than he can count and eaten the snakes for which he was named.

The United States government award him the Army Achievement Ribbon, the Good Conduct Ribbon, Defense Distinguished Service Ribbon, Korean Service Ribbon, the Vietnam Service Ribbon, and the Distinguished Service Cross Ribbon along with several others, but none of this is worth more than what they take (his _self_ ) and calling him honourable will not make it so.

His eye has been stabbed straight through and his aim is still perfect at any distance. He's jumped off a waterfall and made it out the other side and he's walked through the ghosts of the people he's killed. Days later he finds out what he did it for: the United States made him kill his mentor to cover up a nuclear attack and to take the Philosopher's Legacy. The betrayal is so premeditated and unashamed that it almost feels like he signed up for murdering the one person he is capable of respecting at some point he can't recall. Like there was a contract or some planning session he missed. There is no love lost between himself and the land he happens to have been born in.

Zero makes him an icon and a mascot, a legend and a puppet. He resents what he comes to represent.

The Boss made him dependent on war and then turned her back on it after training him to to be unable to understand. He's a soldier. He discards her bandana because she's a solider - how dare she betray that - and takes up a name which is a mockery of hers.

He misinterprets the Mother of the Armed Forces' dying wishes yet again and repeats until he's satisfied. He carries out mission upon mission, shaking clones off his back and discarding more humanity with each ragged breath. He feels it in the sand spread under his palms, warm, as he crawls and approaches and shoots to kill.

Where he's from it's a battlefield without fail in one way or another and organizations collapse as quickly as they are born, swallowed up by the nation's benevolent forgetfulness like they have never existed (Militaires Sans Frontières and Diamond Dogs and FOX and XOF and FOXHOUND and somehow never the Patriots). Island homes you call heaven are there one day like a dream and gone the next.

Elisa dies in his arms and tells him that he'll destroy metal gear only to rebuild it. His son (daughter, as he would know if he had ever had an honest conversation with Liquid) will bring the world to ruin, his son will save the world.

Every time his clone dies he loses something beyond definition. He tries to think about how he felt before Solidus slipped from his fingers and draws a blank. He was a different person, he was _more_.

He has no friends; he has comrades and brothers who would die besides him. He has no friends, just a shadow (not half of Big Boss, that's the most transparent lie) who sacrificed his foolish self to shield him from an explosion that destroyed everything that mattered (rows upon rows of shiny guns and bullets lined up like candy and fat grenades sitting there like eggs, just waiting to-) and casual burning sex with Kaz or Ocelot when they pity him enough that they can pretend he's his phantom For One Night Just This Once, You Won't Tell Him, Will You? This is not friendship. He has children who hate him, children who he's killed and children who think they've killed him.

He has not died yet. He wants war; war, war - until he doesn't. Then he salutes his last living son and walks over the Boss's (Voyevoda's) grave like he doesn't even know it's there. His legacy, his history, it's up in the air or public record depending on who you ask. His three children fester without identity or direction, abandoned to an organization with no one's best interests in mind.

He fights for combatants with the metal gear, slipping into the prophecy and violence of it all with ease. He's a soldier (fuck everyone else, they're not his family), there's no guilt in that, this does not intersect at all with his concept of shame.

They put him on magazine covers and hearald his achievements (enough for two men). He's rescued orphans, it's true, but to raise child soldiers. The world he works towards is something very few people want. They build him statues and write books, teach the martial arts style he helped develop to the world under his name alone.

He stands, salutes, gives his clone advice he doesn't really believe in because he feels that he should. He's killed Zero, he's allowed to die now, and the malicious satisfaction he felt at turning off his life support would not be contained. He tells Snake (solid has more right to that title than him, than anyone, and he is bitter about this, make no mistake) that it's good because maybe if he says it it'll come true. He should have never killed the Boss.

The thing is that even if he dies here he's won because Zero croaked first, so he lets himself love the mentor he turned his back on and falls into eternal rest on her grave.

 **2: venom; punished; phantom**

He crawls out of the hospital on his belly like a snake. He hides among corpses and tells himself that he is not one of them. Ocelot carries him away on a horse like a knight in shining armor. When he rescues Kaz he learns how to be something other than the walking dead again.

A doctor once offered to give him a mask for a face when he already has someone else's flesh wrapped around his skull.

When he gets to the place they call his home, he sleeps at night with Ocelot on one side and Kaz on the other without washing the blood out of his hair. He holds Kaz's missing hand in his own gaping absence. Kaz can tell even though there's nothing physical, nothing more than a brush of ghost against ghost. Ocelot grasps their whole arms and winds them through the sheets, curled around them like a shield. It's almost happy, for a time.

He's the least snake of all of them. It's superficial; skin-deep. He's no one's boss. He's not big. He carries no weight: he is no genetic legacy. He was someone, once, before they murdered who he was and overwrote it with this. Now he's a ghost and it suits his new self just fine even if he doesn't know what his old self would have felt about this. No one asked for his consent.

He rides the D-Horse, white and unspoiled by this desert dust. He returns with raw diamonds and unprocessed metal to knock the staff out on his way to bed and be thanked for it. Ocelot greets him by biting his lip half off and Kaz drags him into a shared shower. The man leans on him for support, lone arm wrapped around his neck like a chokehold.

The stumps look like they hurt. Kaz falls, just once when the soap gets too slippery and things yet too heated. He can't get up again, won't be helped, and Venom Snake is left watching one of his lovers writhe on the floor, limbless - an arm and a leg away from being a snake. He leaves.

He sleeps in a bed containing five eyes, five legs, four arms: three people. Listen, Ocelot tells him, it's the ocean out there. He remembers leaving this island and he remembers having it torn from under him and he doesn't know it, but none of these memories are his. He's Big Boss's most trusted soldier because he owns nothing (not even himself).

But this remains: he may be the phantom of a legend, but the legend is just an echo of him. He bears an artificial and gleaming hatred for XOF and fakes infiltration so well that he even manages to fool himself. Kaz and Ocelot still choose him, the empty building with a diamond façade, above the solidest of snakes and he can't help but think that this means something. He wraps the hope around himself like an embrace.

There's a whispering voice in his ear: Ocelot's persuasive sibilant whisperings and furious soft endearments. Wherever he travels he listens to David Bowie:

 _We must have died alone, a long long time ago_

He straps people to parachutes and lets them soar away from their home and into his, where Ocelot waits (he's never really forgotten that he specializes in tearing people asunder). He sends Ocelot a wolf cub, a sly gift, and received a savage battle-ready beast, a tiny useful fragment of his lover to carry into battle.

This is how it ends for him: he's killed by someone else's clone in part of someone else's war. He dies without one original thought in his mind. Ocelot loses his arm, following Kaz and himself, and then his mind to Liquid in grief. Kaz retires to a house miles from anyone else and raises huskies until some competent stranger shoots him dead.

The brother of his heart, his lungs, the parts of him without thought or control that they didn't give to Big Boss, he forgot long ago. This blood sibling drinks himself into ripe old age. Forgotten, distant from war, he dies aged 76 from a snakebite.

 **3: liquid; white mamba; eli**

Twelve years on this world and a child soldier from the moment she was conceived in a petri dish. Violent. Unique. She's angrier than anything she's ever encountered. Blast radius devastating. She tries to fight everything, even rocks, fences, the strength with which she tramples the ground is a declaration of war. She howls at the sky and when her handlers chastise her, calling her the inferior clone, she slays them and flees.

Leads a child battalion. Makes friends (but really subordinates – she's lonelier than any child has any right to be) in the driest of deserts until her _father_ , her _piece of shit_ _father_ who will never realize he has a daughter and could _never take the_ _initiative_ to save his _children_ destroys her carefully constructed world. Her weapons, her agency, the only strength she knows – it's all taken away and she's treated like a child for the first time in her life.

She bites and scratches at her father, her template, until she's knocked unconscious. She lets them call her boy so she can scratch their eyes out when their guards are down.

She was raised for war. Taken. Fled to war. Taken. Placed on a mercenary artificial island and told that it's over now and she's facing peace, education, being reshaped into something productive for society. She screams; screams, screams. Fights it. She was raised for war and she will deny anything but the battlefield. Pins Big Boss to the wall with a chair and tries to gut him. Fails because it's like her handlers said, she's weak, weak, weak.

They leave her on an island, calling her voice a sickness, with a pistol containing a lone bullet. They say that otherwise she'll burn. She does, but not in the way they intended.

Out there free at last she tries out names on her tongue: **Eli** ssa, **Eli** my (Emily?). She chooses and tells no one and shoots anyone who calls her otherwise. A trail of corpses follows her ascension to Liquid, a name theirs and a form her own.

She's captured, she's brainwashed, and she doesn't have any humanity to lose when she's locked in a dark room with a decomposing corpse for the fifth time.

She's a terrorist on her terms and then she's a subconscious terrorist and whoever's pulling the strings is too distant to sink her teeth into. An IQ of 180 (she doesn't think you can measure such things) with seven fluent languages and none of them allow her to communicate anything important and _in not one of them has anyone ever used the correct pronouns_. She's dying. She controls, but mostly she's controlled, and whenever she manages to break free she just faces her twin's fury for the crimes she never really chose to commit.

She wants to kill her father by surpassing him. She can't do that and she can't upfront kill him, either. There's a hundred people who've touched her life and they've all hurt her and she's hurt all of them (killed most of them, or tried to since she's never been too good at going through with it on her own terms).

Soldiers are manipulated by politicians and she's manipulated by everyone she's ever met. Everyone tramples over her angry, angry recessive imitation self and she can try to reclaim this world for the mercenaries, maybe do something for her father for once (and do it _better_ and possess, steal, his vision and then it can be _hers_ ), but she'll just be thwarted by her twin.

Miller says she has an attitude problem. She says that he can go fuck himself.

Foreseen in a prophecy to bring the world to ruin and she's so fucking angry that she hasn't yet. They've rigged her to expire early by getting too old too quickly and she was designed for leverage over a man she tried to kill three times before she was thirteen. She will not age. She goes out with a bang.

She has never; will never; can never whimper.

 **4: liquid; ocelot**

She's not her twin and she's not her father and she's not that other one or the phantom. She is reborn.

She's been reduced to an arm and clawed her way back into the cerebral cortex. Of all people, Revolver Ocelot becomes her vessel (and _God_ this is not what she wanted, sometimes she still gets so sick she can't move for days because this is more wrong than when she was another Big Boss knockoff just waiting to be deemed useless by Cipher because that body wasn't right but it was _hers_ ). She lives with it.

She's not balanced like them and maybe it's because she'd like to wear heels like knives and drive them into Big Boss's unprotected crotch. Maybe it's because she crawls inside this skin and Cipher own her even when she's broken away. And she breaks away _better_ than David, she breaks away _quicker_ and _stronger_ and even when he's forgotten his genesis she's writhing in it. She is someone's legacy and this she cannot abide.

She dreams about beautiful flowing armor like dresses and lipstick designed to kill with a kiss. She dreams about approaching Big Boss and demanding, really demanding, whether she got this from him or it's her own. Because she might be strong and unique with a soul full of bitterness and shoes or she might just be too weak to suppress something Big Boss identified as a threat to his ability. She wants to decide without him, but she can't.

But there's this underneath her skin: rage. She is like her raven. What she wants is revenge and to _surpass_. She's not Solid, she's not reactive. She's not Big Boss, locked in a life-dooming struggle with one awful individual (and if her twin has thwarted her a few times, what of it - this is not what Zero and Big Boss had). She's not Solidus because she could never _serve_ them, even if both their attempts to harm the Patriots failed equally. She's Liquid; she's molten; she'll burn everything she touches. She'll conquer the world to show them that she can, to show that she's more than a product of _Les Enfants Terribles_. She'll take back her agency bit by bit and cocoon lovely war victims in metal to protect them from their reality, her reality, any reality. She'll set this personified dichotomy on Snake because she's ruthless not beautiful (she doesn't think that she could manage both) and because it's something no one else would have done.

She waits and puts on a show and she fights her twin because she always wins in close-quarters-combat even if he was trained by their father directly and has everything in him dominant. It comes out, she thinks as she activates the stun knife in his shoulder, his dominance wrapped into tiny spirals all inside with that FOXDIE. All those superior soldier genes and the relentless need to conquer.

And if she's deliberately misjudged him, so what. She can't look at him. Not even when she's showing him something impossibly strong, something their father failed to do. The war economy is hers and her twin flees in a boat and she couldn't stop him even if she wanted to. Big Boss of one type or another roasts on a funeral pyre. And, somehow, she still isn't at rest. She's surpassed them all. She's _original_.

She goes back to base and finds some nail varnish in the cracks of a fractured wall. She puts it on her toenails, sloppily overlapping over chafed skin and chilblains, and then slips army regulation socks on top. For a week she can tolerate her existence until Snake drags Ocelot back (screaming) and she ceases like she never existed.

A human construct of hypnosis, drugs and nanomachines dissolves, a construct created and used by a whispering voice she'd banished to the back of her mind to destroy her creators. She hates them and she hates Ocelot and she goes out in a fit of petulant rage because no matter how hard she tries nothing is ever _hers_.

 **5: solidus; george sears; king**

He looks like Big Boss and at first it means so much to him that he has this innate legend stamped across his features. When he gets older he realizes that people see the Legendary Soldier (that he isn't) and nothing beyond that.

And then he's living a life that's already been lived. Acting out each tiny genome twist of fate, making all the mistakes Big Boss had and struggling to alter his environment enough to diverge from this mold into something unique. He rages against this mask that's never quite his (he pictures someone telling Big Boss that he looks like Solidus and he laughs; laughs, laughs) until something snaps.

He takes a ward. Kill the parents, train the child. A little version of himself with a blank slate to write its fate upon instead of a fucking Encyclopedia Of The Legendary Mercenary's Life Achievements And A Few Zero Made Up. He takes the manufactured orphan and adds it to his army for people who aren't fully grown (he wanted to call it child soldiers, it's more open, instead they name it after the devil and that seems too open). Injects the kid, teaches it to abhor guns and use swords like some kind of fucking samurai, and sends it out into the world. Good luck out there, son. By the end of it he can't remember what he was trying to prove or learn, but when the child returns to him wielding swords and an exoskeleton he sees the absurdity of it all and when he's fighting that duel against a (finally) worthy opponent and the sword cuts deep he thinks that maybe _this_ is why: this battle, this freedom.

But it's when they make him president that he really stats to hate something (clue: it's the Patriots who somehow manage to align themselves against all these snakes so eager to sink their teeth into one another). They make him sick. He's a soldier born and raised for war and here they are thinking they've got him tame in a suit, expected to obey commands. They call him a perfect clone and ready to rule but he's a warrior and they can lock him in a room with secretaries and call him Mr. President as often as they like but he will make wherever he is into a battlefield.

He signs their agreements and does what they say (sometimes verbatim through an earpiece) but all the time his muscles are coiled and he's waiting to spring. The tension builds with each day away from his calling and he goes to the gym, punching until he breaks all the equipment. When they give him sparring partners he breaks those too. They keep offering him recruits like sacrifices for a God they can't comprehend, and he knows that these offerings aren't for _him_ , they're for Big Boss. And yeah, it hurts, but not as much as Cipher will when he's finished with them.

He persuades nuclear disarmament because it's funny, so against the Patriots, and no one stops him. His party follow anything he says. Then he goes for anti-eugenics because that's also ringing with irony considering his own creation and no one stops him so he pushes. Pushes and pushes until the most unwanted, undemocratic presidency goes down in history as one of the most humanitarian. He laughs; and laughs, and laughs.

Shadow Moses should be his proudest moment. He gets their most reluctant, unbalanced sibling on board and sure, so many before him have pulled on Liquid's strings, but controlling this clone is _an achievement_. Then he almost thwarts the Patriots' toxic influence, _almost_ destroys the war economy before it has a chance to conquer the world like a plague, and sure his motive was revenge not anything pure but he should have been around to tell Solid Snake _I told you so_. That, they both deserved.

Instead they take away the fawning staff, the title, the coffee and typewriters, and tell the world he resigned. He's in exile and told he faces death for fighting back (like they didn't see the politician in him making war, the soldier in him fighting it, and the snake in him striking hard). It's honest, running from death and hiding with a genetic predisposition to not being seen.

He tries to fight back and this time they manipulate him into advancing their plan. He's frustrated and bitter and becoming old far too quickly even though he has no idea why. They should have told him that they timestamped him, branded him with ownership to prevent any defection and condemned his embryo to an early grave. He impersonates Solid Snake, he impersonates Big Boss, and David only takes issue with the latter (fool – has he not yet realized that everyone will protect Big Boss? no one cares for his children, his shadows – they must protect themselves since they're incapable of tolerating each other).

Big Boss lost his eye - this is what frustrates him as he tries to stem the bleeding from the socket. Is losing an eye to war genetic? And even though he hasn't seen his father in decades and he's declared open war on the Patriots he's still on the same fucking fated path. They're identical, and if his ruined eye is on his left instead of his right then it's only a small consolation.

It's the kid he doesn't honour with pronouns who kills him in the end. He dies at the feet of fucking George Washington like a good little Patriot, having failed to rewrite any political system unlike his idol. He was a better general. No one can deny this. His body is kept alive for a few more decades as spare parts for Big Boss, until he burns under another man's name and is buried in his father's grave, and if there was ever anything original about him then no one remembers it.

 **6: solid; old; david**

Of all the serpents with which he shares so much he is the only one who vomits if he kills too many people. He's the one who hears Liquid's misplaced accusations in his ears when he's creeping in tunnels ("you enjoy killing, that's why…") and he's the one who pauses to consider the loss of life. You'd think that it would spare him some of his father's regret.

He keeps his emotions down, underneath everything, and stays alone. He can tolerate the chirruping of Otacon in his ear. Violence is not glorious. He knows this because he's told himself this every step of his life. He brushes his teeth in the morning and repeats it, at every mission point it chimes in his ear and he can't decide if it's haunting him or a conscious decision to cling to these four words like a misplaced mantra on the battlefield.

He has fifty huskies because forty-nine aren't enough. They're real and warm and usually covered with a light dusting of snow. When he gets too lost he comes back and they teach him how to live again (or they're supposed to, but it's cold up there and it turns out that some traumas run deep).

He doesn't take orders, he's no patriot, but he still carries a certain professionalism that Liquid lacks (it shouldn't matter what Liquid has but it does even if he tells himself that it doesn't). Friendships survive opposite sides in a conflict because he tells himself that this is a job and they're professionals, and that there's nothing wrong with choosing to kill people over looking after dogs. Liquid isn't the friend he's talking about, he insists, until he isn't so sure anymore.

Liquid says that they were created, fated to be killers. He thinks that maybe he's closer to Liquid than anyone, or at least there's some understanding there. He can feel the destructive force inside his twin screaming _autonomy!_ and he wants to fall in the same direction, to destroy everything and make it all _his_.

What he realizes when Liquid Ocelot finally kicks the bucket is that for all his intent he's never fought on the right side. By contrast, Liquid didn't give a shit what side: she fought for herself and she _still_ ended up betraying her cause. He smokes and wonders if favouring tranquilizers over bullets and saving the odd child prodigy really compensates.

Naomi tells him that aging is natural and he laughs inside more powerfully than he ever has before. There's nothing natural about him. The accelerated aging is like his life, really, too brief and focused, and if he needed an answer to what he's spent all these years running away from then here it is. Maybe it's death, but he feels more like it's the Patriots. He refuses to return to his roots, but he doesn't realize that he never left them.

He's fighting Big Boss's war and living in his shadow but it bothers him less than any of the others. Maybe it's because he's killed so many of his siblings (some of them more than once) and thought he'd managed to finally put an end to his father until he found out that it was a fake, a body double. And he's at peace with that. His life mission he never chose has been erasing the legend and he's failed but there are times when he thinks that he's the last living legacy of the Big Boss on Earth, and then he's almost his own.

But he remembers how he fakes flirting to live up to his father and hides his disinterest at any kind of intimate relations. He remembers how Big Boss taught him CQC upon which so much of his identity is grounded, and he looks in the mirror only to see the Legendary Mercenary looking back. Every now and then one of his victories is attributed to Big Boss and his muscles scream with suppressed grief. There's no escaping Big Boss (not least because there are _fucking two of them_ and that shouldn't be surprising because that man never did follow rules).

What really separates him from the others is this: when he's dying or about to die he thinks of easy solitude in the snow surrounded by huskies. When he discovers that he's the 'weaker' clone it doesn't really surprise him, he's never had that predisposition to war that the others held. So he sits there, in his guilt and grief and something he would never admit to being fear, and wonders if he was the best because he wanted it the least. Whenever David is on the battlefield his instincts scream _Run!_ and maybe the others enjoy it too much to bring it to an end.

He ends up retiring, something none of the others would even want, and living the rest of his artificially short life in peace.


End file.
